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Was at the Starting Out panel discussion over at the Arts Museum. Listened in, asked a question, met some people. And hello, if you happen to be passing by this corner of the internet =).

In any case, the question that I asked (and shook up my nerves, especially when it has been a long time since I had done any sort of presentation or speaking in public) was: Much has been said about how writers are now better able to connect to both readers and writers, but is it more a case of writers connecting with other writers?

My point was, despite the tremendous boon of availability, exposure and variety afforded by the internet, local writers are still largely unseen and unheard by the general public (ironic, considering that writing involves being seen and heard). A member of the audience suggested a show of hands, and on a rough count, about half considered themselves writers. Not too bad, but the panel did admit writers were a fairly cliquish bunch, although the distinction becomes less clear when one considers that dedicated readers tend to write as well (and vice versa).

For the most part, it was interesting, exhilarating and a good break from routine. I bought a copy of Ceriph on the way out, probably will read it in camp.

– Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I quite like his style and treatment of narrative, so I’ll be reading more of his works soon.

– J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye.

It has been a while since I last read some of them, and on doing so, the initial shine seems to fade off some of the works. Brave New World and 1984, for instance, doesn’t seem so much a grand look at society but rather how certain tools of oppression, the former force and the latter pleasure, can operate in a society towards that end. We see a bit of it at work in our typical human habits, but nothing to the scale with which these works describe. Also, the supposedly authentic and slangy teenage American voice in A Catcher in the Rye comes across as more phony and annoying than the people Caulfield is trying to critique. But maybe that’s because I read it after An Artist in the Floating World, which comes across far quieter.

As for writing, I’m finishing up the current draft (the third one so far), which is to probably say I’m halfway through. Taking a break with a short story for the Golden Point Award, tentatively titled “The Fishpond” for now.

It’s been a busy week, with three days outfield. Spent a day reading Catch-22 in the back of an M113 in a grassy field amidst the distant sputter of gunfire, to the good effect of finishing 400 pages that I never would have gotten past on a less boring and productive day. The ending was worth it, however.

I’ve also been reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It’s a refreshing experience going back to it after 5+ years of adolescence, and seeing it in greater depth against the grain of one’s society and its norms. In particular, an overbearing abundance of good news and the ever-onward march of progress in the papers. Well, not like I can vote.

Theme from Civ 4. And even though it’s for a game, the music communicates that breadth and depth of human experience that makes it so wonderful.I particularly like the animation sequences for the Wonders, and how those monuments are depicted as a living process and part of history.

For those curious, it’s the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili. There’s also a video of it at the Dubai Fountain too. Worth a watch.

One distinctive feature is its extensive use of the question-and-answer format, which the authors hope will engage younger readers and capture unvarnished the robust exchanges between Mr Lee and his interviewers.

‘He gave us unprecedented access and time because he wanted to reach out especially to younger Singaporeans who may be unconvinced whether his views are still relevant in this day and age.’

‘My abiding concern for Singapore arises from my belief that the younger generation, especially those below 35, had never seen the harsh economic conditions. They therefore do not know the threats we face from neighbouring countries.’ Or as he stressed several times in the interviews, there were hard truths about Singapore that the younger generation needed to understand.

THE DANGER OF THE LIBERAL YOUNG. REALITY IS HARD. LIKE A BOOT STAMPING ON THE HUMAN FACE- FOREVER.

“Every pregnant pause from MM, interspersed with every incisive question from our writers, truly makes the whole read much more rewarding. The book and DVD set also makes for a wonderful gift and keepsake on the history and the making of Singapore.”

ALL HAIL OUR NATIONAL HERITAGE. ALL HAIL OUR LEADERS. I LOVE-

Okay, I’ll shut up now. The Straits Times will gladly provide more information.

Amazing stuff, with the hand-drawn graphics that illustrate the lecture as it goes along, and puts things into perspective under evolutionary psychology. A much disputed theory between dualists, some feminists, fundamentalists and allsorts, but that’s how it is.

“The world is over-armed and peace is under-funded,” says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who points out that global military spending is estimated at over one trillion dollars – “and rising every day.“

I caught this off Bibliophile Stalker just recently, and discovered the trove of speeches and lectures contained within. The whole thing is certainly worth a look, but before that, here’s the lecture I was reading from this year’s (2010) Literature winner.

In short, it’s about the role literature and reading has in society and its ability to transform and uplift the human condition. Amongst the reading:

“Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.“

Of many great authors, past and fairly present, and perhaps a reminder that writing is not just a mastery of single processes, but a mastery of many things at once: the mastery of self, the mastery of craft and an all-encompassing vision that draws the world and its facets into a single, refined gem. It’s no small undertaking, and not to mention a great many books to be read.

“Let those who doubt that literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression, ask themselves why all regimes determined to control the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave fear it so much they establish systems of censorship to repress it and keep so wary an eye on independent writers. They do this because they know the risk of allowing the imagination to wander free in books, know how seditious fictions become when the reader compares the freedom that makes them possible and is exercised in them with the obscurantism and fear lying in wait in the real world, …This fact, if it takes root in their sensibility and consciousness, makes citizens more difficult to manipulate, less willing to accept the lies of the interrogators and jailers who would like to make them believe that behind bars they lead more secure and better lives.“

Okay, I didn’t quite get the second last sentence, but perhaps one could question the role of literature in say…propagating the ultimately disastrous socialist dream in the 19th to 20th century. In that case, the dreamed-of freedom of the proletariat from the tyranny of the upper classes soon becomes the new oppression, where all else is sacrificed, even the blood of millions, in pursuit of this “freedom” (see also: The Fallacies of Moralism and Moral Aestheticism). One only has to read Orwell’s Animal Farm for a sense of this irony.

In addition, one could look towards John Gardner’s argument for “moral” fiction (towards the end), moral insofar as the work acts as a fair arbiter in putting differing values to the test, and works out the truth as objective and fair-handed as possible (i.e. “the way they work is moral”, and not so much the form and content).

However, do not overly read this as disparaging socialism (its merits and shortcomings are another lengthy matter altogether), at least not in the catch-all mudball manner that Americans are apt to use in political smears. Fiction beguiles and puts on a play of truths, but to nail it for such a fault is to miss a larger point, that it provides a vision of what could be and lifts our gaze from the gutter to the stars, in the way Oscar Wilde would put it.

“We should not confuse a blinkered nationalism and its rejection of the ‘other,’ always the seed of violence, with patriotism, a salutary, generous feeling of love for the land where we were born, where our ancestors lived, where our first dreams were forged, a familiar landscape of geographies, loved ones, and events that are transformed into signposts of memory and defenses against solitude. Homeland is not flags, anthems, or apodictic speeches about emblematic heroes, but a handful of places and people that populate our memories and tinge them with melancholy, the warm sensation that no matter where we are, there is a home for us to return to.“

About time that someone said it. Patriotism has often been hijacked for nationalism’s ends, imploring a greater support for the military and its spending, for invasions and foreign wars, for laws that terrorize and divide, both at home and abroad. There’s no need to state examples when each day serves up a new flavour of extremism and paranoid nationalism from every continent.

And the thing is, the things of the heart in this statement are often used as a means to justify the former. One implores to our love for the homeland, and in the next turn, puts a metaphorical gun to it, saying that the gun in their hand is the gun that a foreigner, an external bogeyman would point at it. An old trick in the book of rhetorical flourishes, but people can be counted upon to defend their way of life until their dying breath.

To Singaporeans, this may be familiar in the recent army recruitment posters, which like the ones that have went before it, have been subject to the usual round of ridicule. I’d like to add in, especially on the way that the ads attempt to frame the matter.

The posters display, in national red and white, the words “My Brother, Our Army”, “My Son, Our Army” or even “My Boyfriend, Our Army”, all of them female loved ones beaming proudly at faceless men. Like the above, it is an appeal to the heart. Female citizens, who do not serve “national service” (i.e. conscription, to use the proper word), are called upon to support and have a sense of ownership in the nation’s citizen army, while justification is given for males to sign up for their land and country. It is significant, perhaps, that their faces are missing from the picture; the focus is on the army as a wholesome, family-friendly affair, and not one where bullet and steel rends through the flesh and bone of countrymen, enemies and innocents.

“Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better, to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die. It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us, and because of it we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings, principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like transcendence, individual and collective destiny, the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge.“

And of course, how could a lecture on the merits of literature not end on its ability to tell truths from lies? Perhaps this is the reason for literature’s regenerative ability in the social sphere; it can take expressions and ideas that have been trod into banality, twisted by the words of the self-serving (see: euphemisms, doublespeak) or decrepit with age and bring it back to the foreground, breaking through the parched and hardened ground of common thought like a seed that breaks the earth, and heralds spring once more.